ShadowNinja 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: 99.7% Of Original Comments Opposed FCC Repeal Of Net Neutrality

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 16 Oct, 2018 @ 08:26am

    Re: FCC: Woohoo! 0.3% agree with us!

    Hey 0.3 is still 30% right?

    I mean if I want to type 30% on a calculator that's what I'd enter?

  • On the post: A Decade's Worth Of Meth Convictions Overturned Due To Drug Lab Employee's Misconduct

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 16 Oct, 2018 @ 08:24am

    Re: Countermeasures

    To discourage this form of abuse, the police should semi-routinely submit for analysis known poisons, under the heading of "Potential controlled substance." Chemists reckless enough to sample their wares then risk being poisoned instead of getting free drugs.
    Wouldn't a more effective method be to require the testers to work in pairs at all times, at least when they have their hands on the stuff? And to switch up the pairings from time to time? It's much harder to keep illegal stuff a secret with more people knowing about it. And people are less likely to break the law with others watching them.

  • On the post: Wall Street Quietly Warns That 5G Wireless Is Being Aggressively Over-hyped

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 15 Oct, 2018 @ 08:36am

    Re: Re:

    Woohoo!

    Thanks BIG ISP, I LOVE forking over hundreds of dollars in overage fees to you!

  • On the post: NYC Prosecutors Accidentally Admit They Use Bail To Deprive Presumably-Innocent People Of Their Freedom

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 15 Oct, 2018 @ 07:30am

    Re:

    Honestly, I wonder at times how much better off we'd be if Hollywood didn't make shows or movies glorifying cops, prosecutors, and guns. A few years ago I remember a politician made headlines by saying they see nothing wrong with torturing terrorists, because 'It works for Jack Bauer, and no one thinks he did anything wrong!'. Ignoring the obvious fact that Jack Bauer is a fictional character, and Hollywood writers don't have any real world experience at interrogating a terrorist to know what methods are really effective.

  • On the post: Wall Street Quietly Warns That 5G Wireless Is Being Aggressively Over-hyped

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 15 Oct, 2018 @ 07:36am

    Woohoo! I'll be able to burn through my data cap in even less time then ever when I get 5G!

    I always feel bad whenever I'm not paying massive overage fees to the telecoms, but 5G will make the pain at the start of each new month go away much quicker!

    Maybe I'll be able to burn through all my data in just 5 minutes once 5G is rolled out instead of 10!

  • On the post: Washington Post Gives 'Three Pinocchios' To Rep. Ann Wagner For Falsely Claiming FOSTA Stopped 90% Of Sex Trafficking Ads

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 12 Oct, 2018 @ 12:06pm

    Re:

    Hey, we know that's just what those Northerners did who didn't like how slavery was the law. And that's why the South's economy is still heavily slave labor based today.

    ... oh what's that? We fought a whole civil war over slavery and abolished it?

    But some guy on the Internet told me that the law is the law and we should just live with it!

  • On the post: Cool Cool Cool Oversight Office Says It's Incredibly Easy To Hack The Defense Dept.'s Weapons Systems

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 11 Oct, 2018 @ 01:21pm

    Re:

    But you don't understand! These were good guys testing the system!

    Bad guys won't be able to use these backdoors, because everyone knows that's how it works!

    That's why everyone knows that no home has ever been broken into by a bad guy who then robbed it or harmed/murdered the residents inside!

  • On the post: New Laws Will Force Transparency On California Law Enforcement Agencies Starting Next Year

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 11 Oct, 2018 @ 08:23am

    Re: Re: Re: Hey. Does this apply to Techdirt / Manick calling people "tr

    And I'm sure you're for gun control. So, you're obviously against two bedrock points of common law from the Constitution.
    Gun rights are not enshrined into the constitution. The 2nd amendment only applies to militias, which individual citizens are not. Don't believe me? Here's former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger on the subject saying that the NRA and their reading of the 2nd amendment (which is widely accepted today due to their PR campaign) is a fraud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eya_k4P-iEo I do believe a chief justice knows what he's talking about. Especially since this was before the modern era of ultra partisanship.

  • On the post: 34 State AGs Demand The FCC Do More To End Annoying Robocalls

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 11 Oct, 2018 @ 07:54am

    The robocall problem is so bad for me that it's to the point where I wonder if it's even worth having a phone with how few legitimate calls I get.

  • On the post: Facebook, Whose Support Made FOSTA Law, Now Sued For Facilitating Sex Trafficking Under FOSTA

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 10 Oct, 2018 @ 10:12am

    Re:

    And if Facebook loses something might actually be done about FOSTA if it shows everyone how absurd it is.

  • On the post: Stupid Law Firm Decides To Threaten Something Awful Over Hot-Linked Hitler Picture

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 09 Oct, 2018 @ 11:41am

    Re: Also... Hitler

    ... wouldn't the copyright have expired anyway?

    I recall reading a few years ago about how the German copyright on Hitler's book expired which allowed people to publish it again (something the German government or someone else had previously prevented by buying up the copyright and refusing to print more books of it).

    The book was published before Hitler died yes, but any pictures of Hitler in question can't be much newer then it.

  • On the post: Thomas Goolnik Gets Google To Forget Our Story About Him Getting Google To Forget Stories About Thomas Goolnik

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 09 Oct, 2018 @ 11:33am

    Re:

    Bing is where it's at to look up dirt that RTBF hasn't delisted.

    There was a TD article a while ago that found that so few takedown RTBF requests were aimed at Bing that they didn't even have a process for doing it.

  • On the post: Huawei Says U.S. Blacklisting Will Only Raise U.S. Networking Hardware Prices And Delay 5G Deployment

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 09 Oct, 2018 @ 09:08am

    Re: If they found spying

    If they found spying they'd say "you better give us access to this spying data to. We've been trying hard to weaken encryption to make it easier to spy on people including Americans, so we'll gladly take a backdoor approach to accomplishing that".

  • On the post: Israeli Tech Company's Spyware Still Being Used To Target Journalists And Activists

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 05 Oct, 2018 @ 10:01am

    Re: Re: No, it STARTS with:

    Two wrongs don't make a right.

    There's nothing wrong with admitting that they're both horrible people who do horrible things to each other.

  • On the post: Spanish Court Moves Forward With Prosecution Of Man Who Offended A Bunch Of Religious Lawyers

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2018 @ 06:01pm

    Re: Scientologists apparently need to move to Spain

    Given the religious demographics in Spain, this case actually looks more like a Catholic Majority making laws to suppress the rights of the Atheist minority. According to wikipedia 69.3% of Spain are Catholic, 26% are Atheist/irreligious.

  • On the post: Travelers To New Zealand Now Face $3,000 Fines If They Don't Give Their Device Passwords To Customs Agents

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2018 @ 10:22am

    Re:

    I think all NZ businesses will be hurt by this a lot more.

    If I was a CEO or CTO, I wouldn't want to send any of my employees to NZ and potentially compromise our data. Imagine how much shit you could get into if they access confidential data from one of your clients that you signed an NDA with.

    If they retain records of their findings from your search imagine the shit that could cause if someone hacks into their system and steals the data?

    As for traveling there without a phone or computer, not going to happen. The employees who work for the kinds of businesses that would send them to NZ simply can't work without that stuff.

  • On the post: Body Cam Company Files Patent For Built-In Facial Recognition Tech

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 03 Oct, 2018 @ 12:37pm

    > As Fussell points out, the tech isn't ready yet. Processing power is still an issue. Facial recognition software needs to perform a lot of complex calculations quickly to provide near-instant feedback, and it's unlikely Digital Ally has found a way to cram that into a body cam yet. Moving the processing to the cloud solves space management problems, but would require far faster connections than are ordinarily available to portable devices.

    > But it won't be this way forever.

    I don't know about that.

    We've been working on voice recognition for decades now and it's still not that great.

    The more pictures you add to the database the harder it gets to be accurate with so many people looking so similar. And then you need up to date pictures to. And where are you going to get pictures from in the first place?

    And then there's the picture quality issue.


    Frankly it would be far easier to tell who's who by making them carry some identification chip that they can scan without you even pulling it out, in other words a smartphone and checking who it's registered to.

  • On the post: A Mix Of Good And Bad Ideas In NAFTA Replacement

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 02 Oct, 2018 @ 01:34pm

    So... if in theory the SCOTUS ever ruled that provisions in an enacted trade agreement were unconstitutional and struck them down, what would happen then?

    I mean there's arguments about parts of copyright law/etc. being unconstitutional, such as for being too long, censoring 1st amendment protected free speech, or having fines for violating it that are disproportionately large for such a minor offense.

    I mean clearly the SCOTUS would step in if for example the US signed a trade agreement that said that criticizing the president or foreign leaders was a jail-able offense. They wouldn't just say "well, can't do anything about that one since we agreed to it in a trade agreement with France, sorry free speech advocates".

  • On the post: DOJ Loses Another Attempt To Obtain Encryption-Breaking Precedent In Federal Court

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 02 Oct, 2018 @ 12:30pm

    Given the government's history, I wouldn't ever trust them claiming there's no other way then some radical solution they demand from the courts.

    They knew all along how to break into the San Bernadino phone, and possibly even locked themselves out of it on purpose just to get the precedent.

    But you can look back farther then that for examples of the government blatantly lying to the courts and public. In **Korematsu v. United States** The government argued that it was vital for national security to throw all Japanese Americans into internment camps, and there was no other way to secure our nation. Except... there was solid proof in then hidden government documents that the government knew full well that it was miserable failure that wasn't making us anymore secure and wasn't helping us beat Japan in WW2, all while violating countless Japanese American's rights.

    And the government horrifyingly won the Korematsu v. United States case. The only reason the ruling was overturned was because the government lied to the SCOTUS by hiding those documents, yet there's still damage today caused by that ruling and those constitutional rights violations 3/4's of a century ago.

  • On the post: Did France Just Make It Effectively Impossible To Use Twitter?

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 02 Oct, 2018 @ 08:11am

    Maybe it's time to rethink copyright in the Internet era

    Maybe it's time we reconsider some parts of copyright that especially in the Internet era just don't make sense.

    I mean sure it might sound simple to say you get a copyright on literally everything you create that's not covered by patents/trademarks or specifically exempt (like factual information). But the reality is most of that stuff doesn't need a copyright.

    I mean, when have you ever heard someone claiming to be the victim of copyright theft because of someone else making money off of what you posted on social media?

    And even if things like Jokes are copyrightable, who the hell would ever waste all the time and money suing people over it?

    The only serious disputes I've ever heard about content submitted online are those with overly broad TOS on the copyright (like by submitting this art to a contest you give them the copyright, or by running your source code through a converter you gave them the rights to keep copies of it forever). Or in some rare cases, trying to use copyright law to take down unpopular sites, like for example sites to check for plagiarism on homework that retain a copy of everything ever submitted.

    It's also absurd to just give every type of content the same expiration date. Some copyrightable things have a far longer shelf life and market value then other things. And because the copyright term is so absurdly long many things get abandoned by their copyright holder long before it's copyright expires.

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